Guidewires are fine wires that are used to navigate through the vasculature of a body to gain access to various tissues and organs through a small skin opening. Guidewires are navigated by pushing, pulling and rotating the wire around its longitudinal axis. To improve navigability, it is often desirable that the distal tip of the guidewire be shaped, over a given length such as a length ranging from 0.25 mm to a few centimeters from the distal tip, according to the requirements of a physician operator.
Usually the tip of the guidewire is shaped by inserting the distal tip into a needle introducer device, or any other small tube, and subsequently bending the desired guidewire region by hand. This is performed during a procedure, on an as-needed basis by the physician operator. Because the guidewire tip is shaped by hand, such a bending method may suffer from poor reproducibility and risks introducing shapes that are deleterious to the mechanical integrity of the guidewire.
Some tip shaping devices have been developed to alleviate these shortcomings, but some of them are too mechanically complex for widespread clinical use.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved guidewire tip shaping device for shaping a guidewire.